What are the brain bases of our ability to speak and understand language? Are some parts of the brain dedicated to language? What is it like to lose language? This course provides a state-of-the-art survey of the cognitive neuroscience of language, a rapidly developing multidisciplinary field in the intersection of Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Neuroscience. Lectures cover all aspects of language processing in the healthy brain from early sensory perception to higher level semantic interpretation as well as a range of neurological and development language disorders, including aphasias, dyslexia and genetic language impairment. Functional neuroimaging techniques will be introduced and the course includes a small lab component where students gain hands-on experience analyzing brain data.
Questions: Due every Sunday at midnight (email to: lisa.levinson@nyu.edu)
The main goal of this course is to get you thinking critically about language in the brain. When you start doing this, you'll come up with all sorts of questions. We want to find out what those questions are! Because of this, the most important requirement for this class is to send the TA three questions every week. The questions are due every Sunday at midnight. The questions should be of three sorts:
1. An open ended research question/ project idea
- Good open-ended research questions connect to the course material and are more specific than questions like 'Is language special'. Your open-ended research question cannot be the same question that was the topic of the debate in recitation.
Bonus: Come up with a specific project idea that relates to the open-ended research question.
- Good project ideas connect to the course material and are executable, given currently available techniques and methods. Examples of projects that wouldn't be easily executable: anything that requires invasive methods (e.g., intracranial recordings), anything that requires access to a very specific clinical population, anything that is overly uncomfortable for subjects (and thus wouldn't get IRB approval), anything for which stimuli be impossible to construct, etc., you get the idea.
Bonus: Give examples of the stimuli & tasks that would serve to test the hypothesis.
2. A short answer question
3. A multiple choice question
- Good short answer and multiple choice questions are answerable given the content of the lectures and readings but require non-superficial understanding of the material (rather than just memorization of sentences).
In the exams, we will use your own questions, as explained below. In other words, you get to write your own exams!
Exams
Exam questions will be compiled from the short answer and multiple-choice questions that you yourselves wrote! Before the exam, we will distribute a list of all the questions you've sent to the TA. A subset of those will be used as exam questions. So if you make sure you know all the answers to the questions on the list, you'll have guaranteed an A. We'll also incrementally post the questions online, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to study in advance.
Recitations
Recitations serve two main functions: (i) they provide technical background for the MEG labs and (ii) they serve as a forum for discussion. Further, there will be 2-3 quizzes. What happens in recitation will always be announced in Thursday's class.
In many of the recitations the class will be divided into teams, both of which will be assigned a position in some on-going debate in the field. The debate and the positions will be announced in Thursday's class, but you will not find out what position you'll need to defend until Monday's recitation. So be ready to defend (and argue against) both!
Labs
This course has two labs, carried out in groups of 3 or 4. You will be divided into these groups in your first recitation.
The first lab is an MEG demo at Bellevue hospital, during which you'll learn how the MEG lab is operated. With the lab manager, you'll collect a set of data on an experiment that will be our collective "course project". This lab will be carried out in the time slot of the recitation. Thus, until mid November, one group will always be in the MEG lab during recitation. So everyone will miss the discussion or quiz of one recitation. We'll obviously take that into account in grading.
In the second lab, you'll analyze one subject's data for the course project. This lab is a homework. Via the Neurolinguistics lab manager (Eytan Zweig), you'll need to book one of the data analysis computers in the Neurolinguistics Lab for about 3 hours. You'll will do a complete analysis of one subject's data (detailed instructions will be provided). In the final class, you'll present this analysis to the whole class as a Powerpoint presentation. By the time of the final class, the TA will also have compiled all the results and will present the group analysis for this project. So then we'll see whether we have results!
Instructions for completing Lab 2. Location: Neurolinguistics Lab, 719 Broadway Rm 443
Grading
Questions: 30%
Quizzes (2-3): 5%
Exams(2): 25%
Participation in class and recitation: 25%
MEG labs (2) + presentation of results: 15%
total: 100%
6-Sep GOALS AND QUESTIONS
8-Sep BRAIN BASICS
13-Sep HISTORY: BROCA AND WERNICKE
15-Sep FUNCTIONAL NEUROIMAGING AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY
20-Sep SPEECH PERCEPTION, PURE WORD DEAFNESS
22-Sep SOUNDS AND CATEGORIES
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O'Grady et al. 1997. Contemporary linguistics. Ch 3., pp. 63-73.
- Phillips, C., Pellathy, T., Marantz, A., Yellin, E., Wexler, K., Poeppel, D., McGinnis, M. and Roberts, TPL (2000). Auditory Cortex Accesses Phonological Categories: An MEG Mismatch Study. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 12: 1038-1055.
27-Sep READING
29-Sep DYSLEXIA
4-Oct CONNECTING SOUND TO MEANING, ANOMIA & TRANSCORTICAL SENSORY APHASIA
6-Oct ELECTROMAGNETISM OF LEXICAL ACCESS
11-Oct MORPHOLOGY
- O'Grady et al. 1997. Contemporary linguistics. Ch 4., pp. 117-133.
- Devlin JT, Jamison HL, Matthews PM, Gonnerman LM. Morphology and the internal structure of words. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Oct 12;101(41):14984-8.
- OPTIONAL: Davis MH. Units of representation in visual word recognition. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Oct 12;101(41):14687-8.
- OPTIONAL: Pylkkänen, L., Feintuch, S., Hopkins, E., & Marantz, A. (2004). Neural correlates of the effects of morphological family frequency and family size: an MEG study. Cognition , 91, B35-B45.
13-Oct THE PAST TENSE DEBATE
18-Oct FUNCTION VS. CONTENT WORDS
20-Oct SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT
25-Oct REVIEW
27-Oct MIDTERM
1-Nov SYNTAX, NEUROIMAGING
3-Nov SYNTAX, ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY
8-Nov SYNTAX, APHASIA
10-Nov SEMANTIC PROCESSING: THE N400
- Kutas, M. and Hillyard, S.A. (1980) Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science, 207(4427), 203-205.
- Helen J. Neville, Brain potentials reflect meaning in language, Trends in Neurosciences, Volume 8, 1985, Pages 91-92
- OPTIONAL: Pylkkänen, L., Llinas, R. & Murphy, G. (2006). Representation of polysemy: MEG evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18:1, pp. 1-13.
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15-Nov SEMANTIC PROCESSING CONT.
- Hagoort, P., Hald, L., Bastiaansen, M., Petersson, K.M. (2004) Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science, 304, 438-41.
- OPTIONAL: Pylkkänen, L., Llinás, R. & McElree, B. (submitted). Distinct effects of semantic plausibility and semantic composition in MEG.
17-Nov LANGUAGE AND GENES (GARY MARCUS GUEST LECTURE)
22-Nov WILLIAMS SYNDROME
24-Nov THANKSGIVING RECESS
29-Nov LANGUAGE AND MUSIC
- Aniruddh D Patel, Language, music, syntax and the brain, Nature Neuroscience 6, 674 - 681 (01 Jul 2003) Review
- Paper for Friday's recitation:
Koelsch S, Kasper E, Sammler D, Schulze K, Gunter T, Friederici AD. Music, language and meaning: brain signatures of semantic processing. Nature Neurosci. 2004 Mar;7(3):302-7.
1-Dec SIGN LANGUAGE
6-Dec SPILL-OVER/PRESENTATION OF MEG RESULTS
8-Dec PRESENTATION OF MEG RESULTS
13-Dec REVIEW
22-Dec FINAL. Time: 8am - 9:50am. Room: Waverly 668
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